I admit to him why I take it seriously he’ll just try harder than ever to find a reason to fire me. “I’m just saying Vernette was as much to blame as Simon. Look, I’ll talk to the kid, okay? I’ll make sure he shapes up and apologizes to Vernette, and if he doesn’t I’ll send him to you and you can castrate him. How’s that?”
Ever since he was a kid he’s had this weird habit of sucking his acne-scarred cheeks in and blowing them out again. He’s doing that now. “There’s no need to be defensive. I’m just doing my job.”
“Let me handle it, okay?”
He sighs heavily, as if I’ve asked him for one of his kidneys. “All right, Nathan. But after you’ve talked to him I want you to write up a report about what happened. I need a paper trail in my files in case this blows up in our faces.”
“I don’t get why you’re making such a big deal out of this. Two kids got pissed at each other, that’s all. End of story.”
“It’s not like when you and I were kids anymore. You can’t even believe how fast something like this can turn into an ugly lawsuit.”
Whatever. “Okay. I’ll write you a report after I talk to Simon.”
More cheek-sucking. “Good.” I can tell he wants to say more but he finally stands up and saunters toward the hall. I start gathering my things but he turns abruptly in the doorway. “So I heard that Tom’s back for a visit.”
There are no secrets in Walcott. Tommy could have snuck into town in the middle of a moonless night with his headlights off, dressed in black with charcoal smeared on his face, and somebody still would have seen him. “That’s right. Who told you that?”
He shrugs. “I heard it through the grapevine. Somebody saw him pull into town yesterday. Tell him I said hello.”
What a hypocrite. “I will. I’ll tell him to stop over and see you.”
A sickly smile. “That’s all right. I’m sure he’s got plenty to do without hunting me up.”
He says good-bye and scuttles back to the safety of his office.
Camille’s sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading John Irving’s A Widow for One Year when I get home. She looks up and smiles. “Hi, Nathan. I’ve been abandoned. The boys all wanted to go for a swim in the ocean before they had breakfast.”
How nice of Tommy to leave me with this stranger in my house. “And you didn’t?”
She puts the book down and stretches her arms above her head. She’s wearing a light blue, sleeveless summer dress; her armpits are shaved. “Not on your life. The water’s too cold up here.”
“It’s not that cold. It feels great once you’re in.”
She drops her arms and shakes her head. “I grew up in Fort Lauderdale. Swimming in the ocean there was like taking a warm bath. That’s what it’s supposed to feel like.” She gets up and refills her mug from the pot. “How was teaching?”
“Marvelous.” I put my briefcase in the corner and tell her about Simon and Vernette and Ted Baker.
She makes a sympathetic face, which may or may not be genuine. “Is it always like that?”
“Is what always like that?”
“Teaching.”
I snort. “No. Most of the time it’s worse.”
She sips at her coffee and plays with the cover of her book. “So why do it?”
I shrug. “It pays the bills.” I turn around and hunt for a mug in the dish rack. “I’m a teacher by default. Both of my degrees are in English, and there’s nothing else for me to do in Walcott but teach.” I pour myself coffee and keep talking with my back to her. “Besides, it’s not unbearable, and I can retire when I’m fifty-five.”
When I turn to face her again she’s studying me. “And how old are you now?”
“Thirty-one.”
She frowns. “So you’ve only got twenty-four more years of doing something on a daily basis that you don’t enjoy.”
I grimace. “Are you trying to get me to kill myself this morning or what?”
She grins. “Sorry. I just don’t understand how you can keep doing a job you don’t like, day after day. Especially when you live alone and don’t have kids to support. You could go anyplace and do anything you want.”
She’s starting to piss me off. She’s known me for all of twelve hours and already she’s trying to fix me.
“Yeah, the world is my oyster.” I take a swig of stale coffee and dump the rest in the sink. “But I don’t want to live anywhere else, Camille.”
She hears the irritation in my voice and bites her lip. “I see.”
She stays quiet while I rinse my mug. I take my time doing it, and when I finish and look at her again, she’s apparently decided to give up her interrogation, because she changes the subject.
“Is there a basement under the floor in here?” She gestures behind her. “I tripped over the rug this morning coming out of the bathroom, and while I was straightening it I noticed there was a trap door there or something.”
She probably rooted around in my underwear drawer, too, while she was at it. I untuck my shirt and kick off my shoes. “It’s a wine cellar. Nothing too fancy, but my dad had pretty good taste in red wine. He’d buy a case now and then and toss it down there. I probably still have more than a hundred bottles left.”
“Really? I love red wine. Can I look?”
Why are people so fucking nosy? She should get together with Cheri Tipton; the two of them could have all sorts of fun prying into other people’s lives.
I shrug. “Sure, if you want to.” I kick the rug back and lift the door. It’s kind of heavy, but my great-grandfather rigged it with some kind of ingenious weight system that does most of the work once you get it an inch or two off the floor. I prop it in place and grab a flashlight and lead her down the stairs. There’s just enough room for both of us down here, but I have to bend my head a little to keep from banging it on the ceiling. The cellar smells like earth and old wood, and it’s about twenty degrees cooler than the kitchen. It’s basically just a six-by-eight-foot room with a rack of wine on each wall, and each rack is about half full. I’ve never liked this cellar. It’s dank and claustrophobic and there are cobwebs everywhere.
I shine the light on one rack and Camille pulls out and dusts off several bottles to look at the labels. She gasps at one of them. “My God, this is a two-hundred-dollar bottle of wine.”
“You’re kidding.” I move forward and she hands it to me. It’s a nineteen seventy-two Chambertin. Dad always went gaga over French wine. I like the stuff but I don’t know much about it. “I think I have four or five of these.”
She blinks in the beam of the flashlight and checks out another row of bottles. “I’m not exactly an expert, but it looks to me like you have a small fortune down here.”
I laugh. “I doubt that.”
“No, I’m serious. I haven’t seen a single bottle so far that isn’t worth at least fifty or sixty dollars, and you said you have more than a hundred bottles. So that’s what? A few thousand dollars?”
It’s my turn to blink. A few thousand dollars is hardly a fortune, but it’s nothing to sneeze at either, since I make less than thirty thousand a year even with my summer teaching. “You’ve got to be shitting me. Think I should sell it?”
“God, no. Drink it. Enjoy it.” She steps to the stairwell and stands in the light from the kitchen, and I can see dust floating around her head. She smiles coyly. “Share it with your friends.”
I feel